Swampflix

As we browsed our local video store last weekend, my friend and I were at the directors’ wall and I picked up Ministry of Fear, prompting my companion to tease me for being on such a Fritz Lang kick lately. I’m now decently familiar with his pre-Hollywood films, having seen (and loved) Metropolis, M, and Die Nibelungen, and I’ve seen some of his Hollywood noirs both pre-(Fury) and post-(The Blue…

On the trivia subpage for Die Nibelungen on TVTropes, which treats this film and its predecessor as a single work, there’s a notation that Kriemheld’s Revenge is generally considered the superior work. Since the expansion of Google into mostly pyramid schemes of search engine optimization, I’ve had a hard time verifying that against any academic texts, but the few blog posts I’ve found seem…

The objectively, morally correct thing to do is to reject all generative AI slop in artistic spaces, which of course means rejecting all movies wholly or partially generated by AI prompts. Generative AI may be attractive for movie studios looking to avoid employing human artists by plagiarizing their pre-existing work, but what the audience gets on the other end is a clinical amalgamation of…

The single location two-hander Blue Film is the kind of low budget, high stakes drama that compensates for its smallness in scale by asking big, provocative questions. Questions like, “How was this not adapted from a stage play?”, and “Do we think Dylan ‘Happiness‘ Baker was the first choice to play the pedophile?”, and “Was the working title Trade, Lies, and Videotape?” I kid. Blue Film‘s…

Welcome to Episode #266 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, and Hanna discuss the directorial career of alt-comedy prankster Matt Johnson, starting with his recent time-traveling sitcom sequel Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie (2026). 00:00 Welcome02:22 A Chinese Torture Chamber Story (1994)12:12 Auntie Lee’s Meat Pies (1992)18:51 Caroline Leaf & Suzan Pitt 28:55…

A good friend recently lent me a DVD compilation of experimental short films from animator Caroline Leaf, titled Out on a Limb. He kept excitingly telling me that Leaf primarily works with a “sand on glass” animation technique, which I struggled to understand in the abstract. In retrospect, the term is pretty self-explanatory. Instead of working with the ink-on-paper or clay-on-wire or…

The single-screen microcinema Zeitgeist Theatre & Lounge has been hosting weekly silent movie screenings with live piano accompaniment every Sunday afternoon for months now. I know this because I happened to see a flyer for the series while catching another movie there. While other local repertory series like Prytania’s Classic Movies and The Broad’s Gap Tooth program are regularly well attended,…

I really had no idea what to expect when I put a hold on a library DVD copy of Die Nibelungun. I just wanted to watch some more Fritz Lang. When I opened the case, I found two discs inside and, upon examination, discovered that they were two halves of a single story (or a film and its immediate sequel; I’m sure there is a distinction, but it makes little difference). I remember thinking to…

Most low-budget genre movies I tend to recommend on this blog make up for their lack of resources with an excess of style. I love a scrappy production that strives to impress its audience in every frame, distracting us from the shoddiness of the acting, sets, and props with an extravagance of over-the-top images & ideas. A major problem with those kinds of high-style, low budget oddities, though,…

There’s a saturation point with overtly derivative horror movies where, if you make enough of them on a similar topic, they stop being treated as knockoffs and start being treated as a legitimate subgenre. Were there any dedicated fans of Bob Clark’s Black Christmas that initially brushed off John Carpenter’s Halloween as a copycat knockoff in 1978? Maybe, but dozens of Fridays the 13th later,…

John Waters’s Desperate Living is, for all practical purposes, my favorite movie. I’ve seen it dozens of times — twice theatrically. This week, I learned something new about one of its most outrageous scenes: the babysitter on acid vignette. It’s a minutes-long gag wherein one of the citizens of Mortville explains that their expulsion from proper society resulted from brutally murdering their…

For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss the Turksploitation sci-fi parody Ömer the Tourist in Star Trek (1973). 00:00 Welcome02:37 Maisie Was a Lady (1941)06:47 Ringside Maisie (1941)10:56 Maisie Gets Her Man (1942)15:32 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920)18:58 The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923)20:15 The Man Who Laughs (1928)25:11 Die Nibelungen (1924)35:15 All…

I Love Boosters is many things. It’s a heist movie that takes a sharp left turn into science fiction territory. It’s a jeremiad about the life-destroying conditions of the sweat shops in which most of our clothing is manufactured. It’s a meditation on the material conditions of entry level retail work, and it’s a barely exaggerated take on C-suite self-aggrandization, and it’s a satire that takes…

At last! A freshman feature from a filmmaker who made their bones on YouTube that I actually enjoyed! When I walked out of Obsession, I texted Brandon to let him know that, alas, I had hated it. He replied that this meant that “the Talk to Me curse has not lifted,” and I responded that I had loved Bring Her Back, and he astutely noted that this was a different thing: “That one’s elevated Grief Is…

The abundance of praise for Obsession is making me feel like I’m losing my mind. Everywhere I go, people are talking about it, well, obsessively. Was I, as my friend Jeb has suggested, simply in the wrong mood when I saw it? Am I simply getting too old and out of touch with, as Brandon has suggested to me, youthful prankster horror? I feel like it was fine, but I’ve seen The Twilight Zone and…

I had zero interest in seeing The Sheep Detectives. Any film that advertises itself as being “from the director of Minions and Despicable Me 3” knows that it is both reaching out to its intended audience as well as forewarning those, like me, who are not part of that number. I also don’t normally bother with family films; I have no children and know almost none, but I got to meet my partner’s…

I was intrigued by the initial trailers for John Patton Ford’s modern update on Kind Hearts and Coronets, How to Make a Killing. Glen Powell as the disenfranchised heir to a massive fortune who has to pick off his awful relatives one by one, what’s not to love? Unfortunately, a better question would have been “What’s there to love?”, and the answer is “Not very much.”  The extravagantly wealthy…